Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas continues from here
AG: Now, the liberal humanistic or the Gay Lib view of that, I should say, otherwise known as the Radical Lib view, is that this is only a symbolic statement of the fact that everybody has both masculine and feminine in them, but I think there’s some deeper purport. It couldn’t be just (as) easy as that.
Student: No.
AG: It couldn’t be as easy as that. You could say the parallel, obviously, that we’ve already gone through, is that the external projected universe (which) seems feminine is, after all, only a projection of the original projector, and that projection and projector are one, and it’s purely an illusion that the universe exists outside separate from the projector. So in that sense, he may be using it (in that sense), or the mythologies may mean that. Or something like that. That it is only an illusion. That the separation or the extremeness of the separation of the sexes as seen now in human history may be a degenerated by-product of that original separation of subject and object, which was the Fall of Man or some basic fall of human consciousness into fragmented Samsaric mind.
Student: Yeah, that’s why … because (he) is a projector, himself …
AG: Yeah.
Student: … and a male..(and so) the opposite will appear as woman. But that doesn’t… I think the system can be interpreted for a woman.
AG: Yeah.
Student: And not necessarily … she doesn’t have to hang her head in shame.
AG: Well, it has been. I’m sure there must be many Great Mother myths in which, yeah, the Great Mother gives birth to the universe and then eats it up again.
You know that? It was an old myth. Kali. Kali eats it back up. She gives birth and eats it back up.
Student: Well, that’s almost the reverse of this situation.
AG: Yeah.
Student: She requires male blood to be alive..
AG: The women have to die for (the) men to live in Blake.
Student: Yeah.
AG: Or the women have to die for Albion to be united with his Emanation. In other words, the woman has to die into Albion for him to be united with his Emanation. Then what is he? Then is she reborn? I don’t remember. I forgot. We won’t know that until we get to Jerusalem. Do you remember at all?
Student: Jerusalem has an existence but it’s very paradoxical because everything is one at the same time. Once they’re in Eden …… her identity is another part of him and they can go on telling stories about identities, but they really don’t have separate identities any longer. It all becomes storytelling.
AG: I guess you could make this somewhat a parable of what happens after you’re married thirty years, where people’s identities die into each other and there’s no longer (separate identities).
Student: Also biologically at birth in the womb and even the physical body the similarities between the clitoris and the male genitals and also later on in later age men start to form breasts and lose a lot of their body hair and women start picking up body hair, become sort of stronger.
AG: Okay. I think that’s the Radical Lib, or obvious, or materialistic, interpretation, which is that there is man and woman both in man, and there’s man and woman both in the woman.
Except that Blake is down on homosexuality, though.
to be continued